Amd

If you’ve been thinking of a graphics upgrade, now is the perfect time to pull the trigger: Fresh new GPUs from Nvidia and AMD promise a lot of bang for not much buck, there’s downward pressure on prices across the board as existing hardware gets older, and we won’t see any new launches for several months (think the summer or later). Read More >>

AMD’s fighting competitors on all fronts. It’s battling Intel in the CPU space, with each company advertising more cores and tacking on more features to woo users (and manufacturers) away from the other. Yet its battle against Nvidia in the GPU space is different. While Nvidia comfortably dominates the high-end space, AMD has been content to offer cheaper cards with comparable power in the mid-range and below. The Radeon VII, AMD’s new £700 card—the first 7nm GPU to ship to consumers—is intended to take on Nvidia’s very best cards. What’s surprising is that it isn’t just as good as Nvidia’s best—sometimes it’s better. Read More >>

At CES earlier this month, Nvidia and AMD traded words, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang saying his GPUs would “crush” AMD’s newly announce Radeon VII. AMD CEO Lisa Su was more measured in her response, but she didn’t pass up the opportunity to make a dig at Nvidia, noting that when her company finally adopts ray tracing, people would actually know what it is. But let’s set aside their back and forth on ray tracing and GPUs and hone in on another tiff between the companies – this one is about monitors, and if you’re buying one for gaming in the next few months, you need to pay attention. Read More >>

Welp, yesterday I spent two hours listening to the CEOs of rival companies talk trash about each other. It reminded me of my parents right after their divorce. Nvidia was shit talking AMD, and AMD politely responded with just enough bite for you to take notice. Read More >>

Usually, the biggest announcements at CES are over with by the end of the first day, but during its second-day keynote AMD CEO Lisa Su announced a new GPU, the AMD Radeon VII. According to Su, it is the very first 7nm graphics card available to consumers. Read More >>

The elephant in the room has been, for a very long time, Moore’s Law—or really, its eventual end game. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted in a 1965 paper that the number of transistors on a chip would double each year. More transistors mean more speed, and that steady increase has fuelled decades of computer progress. It is the traditional way CPU makers make their CPUs faster. But those advances in transistors are showing signs of slowing down. “That’s running out of steam,” said Natalie Jerger, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto. Read More >>

The unstoppable stock market has been experiencing some turmoil recently with the S&P 500 experiencing the most daily losses since 2008. Tariffs, interest rate hikes, and tech stocks are getting a lot of the blame from financial tea-readers. Here’s the good and the bad we saw from the earnings reports of the tech giants that showed their hands last week. Read More >>

I won’t lie, when AMD’s new 16-core monster CPU, the Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, arrived, I ran around the office showing off it and its accompanying air cooler to anyone who would make eye contact with me. The thing is enormous—easily twice as large as a standard desktop CPU from Intel. The air cooler, saddled with the goofy name Wraith Ripper and festooned with LED lighting, is larger than most power supplies, and if dropped, it could do damage to floors, feet, and small woodland creatures. Even people who know nothing about computers were suitably impressed by these enormous pieces of PC. Then they’d ask how much the Threadripper 2950X cost. Read More >>

Samsung TVs just got a little more admirable. AMD announced that its FreeSync technology, previously only available for gaming monitors, is coming to Samsung’s 2018 QLED televisions. This means all your games played on the latest-generation Xboxes, or on a PC with an AMD GPU, should look a whole heckuva lot smoother. Read More >>

Almost as soon as Intel had announced its new 28-core beast, AMD took the stage at Computex and revealed the latest update to its Threadripper CPU, and it has more cores—32 cores to be exact. That’s more cores than you’ll ever need to do your tweets and fill out your spreadsheets, but this isn’t about processing, it’s about power. Read More >>

Intel is finally confirming that its computer processors are vulnerable to an additional variant of Spectre, the nasty security vulnerability that affects nearly every CPU currently in devices and in the marketplace. Read More >>

There are few gambles in the tech world as big spending billions to build a new computer processor from scratch.Former AMD board member Robert Palmer supposedly compared it to Russian roulette: “You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out.” Six years ago AMD loaded the gun and pulled the trigger, dramatically restructuring itself internally in a mad bid to escape a disaster of its own making. Now we’ve seen the results and instead of dying, AMD has a savvy new CPU microarchitecture, Zen, that’s the foundation of the shockingly good new series of Ryzen processors. They’re so good, in fact, that they could pose a real challenge to Intel’s incumbent dominance and change what the computer market looks for the next few years. Read More >>